Luca Longo’s analysis
A troubled history that of Crimea: the peninsula connected by land to Ukraine, but separated from mainland Russia only by the Kerch Strait: 4 km of water that divide – but only formally – the Sea of ​​Azov from the Black Sea.
Because of its geographical location, Crimea is a bridge between two cultures but history shows that it is destined to survive the same cultures it connects. Romans and Muslims, colonial Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Europe of nationalisms and Tsarist Russia, Nazi-fascists and the Soviet Union, and now a Ukraine ever closer to NATO and Russia have faced each other along that natural bridge.
Both in peacetime and in wartime, building a stable link in that area has always been seen as strategic for alternatively commercial or military needs.
Already in 1783, Prince Grigorij Aleksandrovic Potemkin (exactly the one after which the battleship symbol of the October Revolution was named), on a mandate from Catherine the Great conquered Crimea, had Sevastopol built and planned the first road connection from St. Petersburg to the ‘Ottoman Empire.
A century later, in 1870, the first change of direction of travel: the British colonial government plans a railway bridge between Crimea and Asia. A bridge that allowed to connect London to the Indian colonies with a continuous railway line as well as with the telegraph line inaugurated a few years earlier.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Tsar Nicholas II had the same idea, but with the diametrically opposite need to connect Holy Mother Russia to the territories of Eastern Europe.
In 1942 another reversal: Hitler commissioned Albert Speer “the Architect of the Reich” to build a spectacular bridge to favor the unstoppable Nazi invasion of the oil territories of the North Caucasus. The order was to complete a combined rail and road bridge within six months.
But history punishes those who are too ambitious: between January and October 1943 a rope bridge with a capacity of 1000 tons per day hastily built by the Nazis served not for the unstoppable advance, but for the disorderly escape of the Caucasus Army and the Group of Armies “A” of the Wermacht.
The first parts of the superb brick bridge, still under construction, were blown up by the Red Army, which had definitively arrested the black hordes on the Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad line and would not stop before Berlin.
Another reversal and, in the middle of ’44, the Soviet troops exploited the building material abandoned by the former unstoppable Nazis to build a temporary railway bridge of 4.5 km – a little further north, at the point where the ferry crossing – to carry troops and supplies for the liberation of southeastern Europe. Six months later, the temporary bridge, having finished its function, was knocked down by the ice carried by the currents.
In the 1960s, the Soviet government gave birth to the “Kerch Hydroelectric Unit” project: a series of bridges and dams designed with the dual objective of connecting Crimea to the continental Soviet Union and capturing the energy produced by sea currents .
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bridge project was set aside to resurface and disappear several times in the intricate diplomatic vicissitudes between Ukraine and Russia.
With the referendum on self-determination of March 16, 2014 – in which 97.3% of the citizens of Crimea vote to join the Russian federation – the construction of the bridge is once again a strategic objective under the responsibility of a single government. The Stroygazmontazh company – in charge of carrying out the work – began construction of the road bridge in May 2015 and completed it six months early in just three years.
As evidence of the fact that this is a place of strategic importance, during the cleaning of the seabed, the remains of over 200 bombs, Ilyushin Il-2 and Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk aircraft and numerous war remnants were recovered. Hitlerites.
It should be noted that, due to the sanctions against Russia, no major insurance company had been able to cover the risks of a work costing 230 billion rubles (about 3 billion euros) if something went wrong. This is why Arkady Rotenberg – the owner of Stroygazmontazh – swears he had goosebumps for the entire duration of the construction.
On May 15, 2018, the President of the Russian Federation inaugurated the longest bridge in Europe: four lanes capable of passing 40,000 vehicles a day without tolls for 18.1 km (for comparison, the Messina bridge – eternally undergoing project – should be 3.3 km long). Alongside the road bridge, a double railway track is expected to be completed by early 2019.
It is significant that – instead of the usual inaugural procession of black limousines – Putin driving a large Kamaz construction truck drove a caravan of heavy orange construction vehicles from Taman to Kerch with the workers who carried out the work on board. Not only a recognition to the workers but also a clear warning that the bridge is already capable of rapidly transporting heavy vehicles from one point to another in the Russian Federation.
Now Russia has a continuous land connection with Sevastopol from which the ships that reach Tartus in Syrian territory depart. A naval base of fundamental importance to allow Moscow to continue the war against ISIS terrorists.
Speaking of connections, we recall that the Ukrainian crisis and the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia have blown up the South Stream gas pipeline project, now redefined Turkish Stream, where two billion euros of Agip orders had been deposited. If the TAP project goes through, the Turkish stream together with the Trans Anatolian Gas Pipeline will carry methane – via TAP – to Puglia and to our home.
Returning to the present day, the Kerch bridge has recently demonstrated its effectiveness not only in the East-West land connection, but also as a barrier between the Sea of ​​Azov and the Black Sea.
We saw this in the Russian Navy’s punitive blitz, which captured three Ukrainian warships on November 25 – ostensibly in response to Ukrainian navy’s provocations of Russian fishing vessels working in the Azov Sea. When Poroshenko ordered the Ukrainian navy to send more military vessels across the strait, the Russians had only to place an empty container ship “randomly” ready nearby in the 227 meter wide and 35 meter high bay in the center of the bridge. cut off the warlike Ukrainians.
President Poroshenko, in view of the elections scheduled for the end of March 2019, tries to have a reconfirmation but, according to the polls, he is only in fifth place in the ranking of presidential candidates. For this reason, now – like many leaders before him – he is attempting the card of mobilizing his compatriots on an issue of security and threat from the outside. It is clear that, in full decline in popularity, leading a highly indebted nation that has already borrowed from the EU and the International Monetary Fund, Poroshenko wants to show NATO that he represents a strategic pawn for the Atlantic Alliance and that the west must continue to focus on him.
General Giuseppe Morabito, a lecturer at the NATO Defense College Foundation, believes that, after a few days of “bellicose declarations also for internal use (see the aforementioned March elections), Ukraine switches back to diplomatic dialogue since the country is almost dependent on entirely from Russian gas supplies and Putin’s “half a turn of the handle” this winter would be equivalent to “so cold” for the even “fiery” nationalists of Kiev ».
To the good connoisseur …
